When we think of surveillance cameras, we always think of them watching us. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact surveillance cameras are used in a variety of different – sometimes unexpected – locations for important tasks that take place where it is difficult for humans to easily go. Such cameras could be termed special use surveillance cameras, and are more prevalent than we might at first realize.
A good example of this is the recent Deepwater Horizon oil platform explosion. Directly after the explosion surveillance cameras mounted on robotic underwater submarines were used to assess the damage, to find where the leaks were and to allow operators to make further attempts to close emergency shutoff valves. Cameras were used at all stages of positioning the funnel structure as it was lowered a mile into the waters and secured over the largest of the leaks.
Surveillance cameras can go where man can’t. Where the environment is so hostile we cannot survive. From the depths of space, where unmanned probes are sent with cameras that beam back clear images of the planets, comets and moons of our solar system to deep sea exploration cameras that allow us to see images at depths that would crush us in an instant.
Cameras can be sent into dangerous circumstances. They can search partially collapsed buildings where there is further danger of collapse after earthquakes. They can venture into poisonous atmospheres to locate chemical or gas spills. They can be landed on other planets to allow experiments that would otherwise be impossible to be carried out. We may not be able to land a man on Mars yet, but we can still use remote probes to perform experiments on the surface, aided by surveillance cameras.
These cameras do not always have to cost a fortune. In September 2009 a camera costing less than $150 was sent by two students to an altitude of 93,000 feet to record pictures of the stratosphere. The camera successfully took its pictures and returned to earth. The pictures it took, although not showing anything new, prove that even domestic over the counter cameras can perform in remote and hostile conditions.
We also use cameras to test – sometimes to destruction – potentially dangerous equipment. The television program Mythbusters is the perfect example of where remote surveillance can bring results that would otherwise be unsafe to collect. We can crash vehicles and aircraft, observing the results without being close enough to the actual crash to be in danger of being harmed.
And it’s not just the places that cameras can go which makes them so useful. Special high speed cameras can take hundreds of frames per second, allowing us through slow motion photography to slow down the fastest events to better understand what happens. The human eye cannot see a bullet fired through an object in detail, but the camera can and can slow down the event to a level that we can perceive and study.
Cameras can see things we can’t. Try looking at it through the lens of a digital camera, camcorder or webcam. You will be able to see the flickering LED that issues instructions to your television or video recorder. The human eye cannot see such a frequency but a camera can. Expanded, this technology allows for infra-red heat seeking cameras of the kind used by earthquake search teams to check for body heat in the rubble of collapsed buildings. It allows night vision cameras that can see frequencies of light the human eye cannot perceive in darkness.
Once set up, a camera will continue to perform a given task until it is commanded otherwise, a use that wildlife photographers have explored, both in the observation of plant growth with cameras that take a single frame a day to the way that birds or bats wings flap with tiny pinhole cameras that can be strapped to larger birds and transmit their pictures to receivers away from said wildlife.
Since its first series proved popular in the UK in 1996, the BBC has used supervised and unsupervised surveillance cameras in its week long Big Cat Diary broadcasts to capture never before seen footage of the lives of prides of big cats and those cats hunting at night. The series has proved so popular that it is aired in eleven countries.
From this short list of examples it is possible to see that surveillance cameras are used all over the world by all kinds of people for things other than watching us. The world around us, from the plants and animals in it to the solar system around it opens up to us through the lens of a camera, and we can learn more about all the aspects of our existence by observation and experimentation aided by surveillance cameras.